Conference Agenda

The conference agenda provides an overview and details of sessions. In order to view sessions on a specific day or for a certain room, please select an appropriate date or room link. You may also select a session to explore available abstracts and download papers and presentations.

Working together with community stakeholders from the one of the few remaining indigenous communities in the Caribbean, Kalinago Territory, Dominica, this research seeks to better understand the impacts of land use land change on cultural ecosystem services. The landscape of the Kalinago Territory has changed rapidly over the past ten years, impacting not only the natural ecology but also the cultural practices and traditions that play an integral part in the community fabric. Therefore, this collaborative research seeks to better understand the interaction between society and ecology in a mixed methods approach. To do this, the methodology combines community GIS, remote sensing, and ethnographic analysis. By using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, this analysis seeks to provide sustainable and lasting solutions, addressing not only the impacts of landscape change on the natural ecology but also the customary practices and traditions, social practices, access to amenities, communal heritage; in sum, perceived well-being.

Interface Between Customary And Formal Land Management Systems: Mizoram, India

Devika Bahadur

World Bank, India

This paper analyzes the interface between formal and customary forms of land management, in the Indian state of Mizoram. Mizoram is inhabited by a tribal population, which traditionally followed a communal-based village-centric form of land management aligned with their unique form of shifting cultivation. Traditionally, land was held communally at the village level with individual rights being limited to temporary usufruct rights. Since India got independence from British rule in 1947, Mizoram has enacted various legislations to formalize their landholding systems. These laws attempt to reconcile the reality of Mizoram’s traditional systems with the requirements of a modern land administration. However, the process of convergence of such protected areas with modern state-oriented land management and administrative structures has not been smooth and raises many questions. This paper analyzes the gaps that are arising in the process of formalizing and privatizing traditional communal land rights. This analysis specially looks at these rights in the context of land acquisition. Mizoram faces a severe infrastructural deficit, dealing with which requires vast tracts of land on an urgent basis. This is inevitably creating a flashpoint for potential disenfranchisement of traditional landholders in Mizoram, which necessitates such an analysis.

1University of Campinas, Brazil; 2Federal University of Tocantins, Brazil

Internationally there are an alarming number of violations of indigenous peoples’ land and human rights. Brazil is currently under the spotlight as the heightening of the political crisis that led to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff brings national and international concerns over the uncertainty related to changes in policy that may be adopted by the interim Government in relation to indigenous peoples land rights. With a focus on land governance, our study aims to assess if the policies for indigenous land in the Legal Amazon and Matopiba since the Constitution of 1988 represented an improvement or regress to the indigenous population’s land use and access rights. We structured this study in the following way: 1) Background on Brazilian weak land governance and its relation with indigenous land rights, 2) Indigenous territories’ laws and improvements after 1988, 3) Sources of pressure on indigenous territories – Agribusiness, 4) Sources of pressure on indigenous territories – Large-scale infrastructure projects, 5) Discussion and policy proposals.

They Will Need Land! The current land tenure situation and future land allocation needs of smallholder farmers in Cambodia

Jean-Christophe Diepart

Mekong Region Land Governance, Cambodia

In this paper, I discuss the needs smallholder farmers have for land, projected up to the year 2030. The main problem it examines lies at the intersection between the demographic increase in the rural smallholder population and the possibility offered by the different land tenure regimes to meet this demand.

By looking at how much land is needed for family farmers in the future, the paper anticipates the land requirements of smallholder farmers by 2030 based on the projected demographic increase in the economically active population in rural Cambodia and on two sets of scenarios i) the transfer of unskilled labour from the agricultural to the secondary and tertiary sectors (industries and services) and ii) the provision of land for smallholder farmers.

The analysis suggests that by the year 2030, the transfer of unskilled labour from agriculture to the secondary and tertiary sectors will lag behind the demographic increase in the active rural population. With 2015 as a baseline, the scenarios suggests that by 2030 smallholder farmers will need an additional land area ranging from 320,600 ha to 1,962,400.

The paper discusses different options, which are not mutually exclusive, to allocate this land without further impact on the forest cover.